The government has been accused of covering up the full extent of the UK’s support for India’s bloody crackdown on Sikhs in 1984.

A new report calls for a full inquiry into the role played by Margaret Thatcher’s government in the events leading up to a massacre in which hundreds, possibly thousands, of Sikhs and Indian soldiers died.

In 2014 David Cameron ordered a review after the accidental release of secret documents revealed that a British SAS officer had been drafted in to advise the Indian authorities on removing armed Sikh militants from the Golden Temple at Amritsar, Sikhism’s holiest shrine.

The documents said the plan, known as Operation Blue Star, was carried out with the full knowledge of the Thatcher government.

A report, Sacrificing Sikhs, published by the Sikh Federation UK, described Cameron’s review, conducted by Sir Jeremy Heywood, as a “whitewash”.

It claims that attempts to expose the full facts have been thwarted by government secrecy rules and conflicts of interest. More than half of the Foreign Office’s files on India from 1984 have been censored in whole or in part.

Some documents suggest the Foreign Office was aware of what was at stake when the Indian authorities approached the UK for help.

A week before the Golden Temple assault, Bruce Cleghorn, a diplomat, wrote that “it would be dangerous” for the UK government “to be identified” with “any attempt to storm the Golden Temple in Amritsar”. He was also named in correspondence discussing possible SAS assistance to India immediately after the massacre.

In 2015, Cleghorn became a Foreign Office “sensitivity reviewer” whose job involved censoring documents about the Amritsar massacre before they were released to the National Archives.

Sir John Ramsden, a member of the Advisory Council on National Records and Archives, which adjudicates on government censorship applications, was a member of the Foreign Office’s south Asia department in 1984. Ramsden wrote a letter advocating further SAS assistance for India immediately after Operation Blue Star and also argued in favour of equipping India’s paramilitary forces.

The role of the SAS officer in the days before Operation Blue Star are shrouded in secrecy as are the full extent of the fatalities. The Indian government puts the figure at about 400. Sikh groups say it was in the thousands.

According to the Sikh Federation’s report, immediately after the SAS officer carried out his reconnaissance with an Indian special forces unit, the Sikhs pulled out of peace talks believing they had seen a commando unit move into the city. The negotiations never recovered and eventually the Indian army stormed the temple in June 1984. Four months later, India’s prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by one of her Sikh bodyguards, prompting reprisals that led to the deaths of more than 3,000 Sikhs.

The report suggests the UK was keen to help India because the country was one of its biggest purchasers of military equipment between 1981 and 1990. It also claims that repressive measures against Sikhs were carried out in the UK to appease the Indian government and secure arms deals.

“The government needs to finally come clean about Thatcher’s role in the Amritsar massacre and India’s crackdown on Sikhs,” said the report’s author, Phil Miller. “Whitehall censorship of historical files is like an old boys’ club that prevents the public from ever knowing how taxpayers’ money was spent. This culture of secrecy around Britain’s special forces and intelligence agencies is undemocratic and unsustainable.”

Bhai Amrik Singh, chair of the Sikh Federation (UK) said: “This report casts serious doubts on the adequacy and integrity of the inhouse Heywood review commissioned by Cameron. There has been a massive cover-up and parliament and the public have been disturbingly misled. An independent public inquiry to get to the truth is the only way forward.”

This is one of those photos that shore up all literary descriptions you’ve ever read of Lebanon as the land of milk and honey.

Because only that sort of blessed (but unfortunately cursed too) land could produce Lebanese food. More than the landscape, the mountains, my personal emotional response to a still functioning society of Arab Christians, the post-nightmare joy that even a partly-Resurrected Beirut must offer, and more, even, than the boys — it’s the food that makes Lebanon one of the top entries on my list of must-visits. The boldness of the Lebanese culinary imagination reflects such care for both the sensuality and sanctity of food that I can’t helped being moved by just reading descriptions of it. China, India and France (mmm…yeah, ok, Iran too) are the only places that can compete, I think, with this tiny little corner of the Mediterranean in sheer kitchen creativity.

Mansoufe (below), for example: made of pumpkin-and-bulgur balls, cooked with caramelized onions and flavored with sour grape juice. Where else would people even think of this? (Though I think “dumplings” or something might have been a better word; “balls” makes it sound like pumpkins have testicles.)

But just like there’s not really any French food without the produce of France itself, and like I’ve come to believe what most South Asian friends think: that there’s no good regional Indian food outside of India, just Punjabi versions of dumb-downed Doabi-Mughlai food cooked by Sylhetis (though I know two good Bengali places in New York, one in Sunnyside, where you have to convince them you want the real stuff, and one in the Bronx, and an even better secret, a great Sindhi vegetarian place in Jackson Heights…Indian vegetarian is the only vegetarian food I’ll eat, actually the only vegetarian food I’ll honor by calling “food”), so, it seems, that if you want something other than stale felafel or inedible tabbouleh made by a dude who had too many lemons he needed to get rid of and who needs to be told that parsley isn’t a vegetable, then you need to go to Lebanon.

In steps the Food Heritage Foundation to help you get your bearings food-wise once you’ve gotten yourself to Lebanon: a great resource for anything you might want to know about Lebanese cuisine. Yesterday they posted photos of the Ein Zebde (the Shouf village with the peach orchards at top) celebration of the Feast of the Holy Cross, and the annual potato-kibbe-making event the women there have held for the past twenty-four years. Check out the page for captions on the pics below:

Yesterday I tweeted my kudos to the Food Heritage Foundation (above). But actually it would have been impossible to hide the fact this is a Maronite community even had they wanted to. Even if they felt they didn’t have to explain why the women were doing this, the women’s hair and bare arms would have been a giveaway.

Still, I’m just saying this because if certain people like Mlle I___m de M_____i had their way both the entire staff of the Food Heritage Foundation and I would’ve been thrown in jail for fomenting sectarianism, publicly shamed for being Islamophobic and made to wear a Green “I”, and the Ein Zebde post would have had to be mysteriously cleansed of its Christianess.

The feast of the Holy Cross — I doubt any Catholics remember or even know — commemorates the discovery by the Empress Mother Helen of the Holy Cross on which Christ was crucified, of which Mark Twain famously said there were so many splinters of everywhere that it was apparently a Holy Forest. She was the mother of Constantine, the emperor who moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to the city on the Bosporus called Byzantion, renamed Constantinople (that’s İstanbul for those that don’t know), and who, like a good mother-ridden Greek boy (though he was really from what’s now Niš in in what’s now southern Serbia), unfortunately made what-a-monotheist-drag Christianity the official religion of the Empire to make her happy; though also like a good Greek boy he passive-aggressively wasn’t himself baptized till he was on his death-bed. The discovery of the Cross and the feast of Sts. Constantine and Helen, “the Equal-to-the-Apostles”, on May 21st, when Athens is paralyzed by traffic for three days because a quarter of the city is named Kosta or Helene and another half is going to visit them for their name-day, is usually commemorated in the Orthodox Church by the same image:

Maybe the best line from last night’s season four opening of SHOWTIME’s Homeland…and maybe a nomination for best “nuff-said” comment ever on the Land of the Pure.

(click)

Led to me to look up exactly what the acronym was and came across the brilliant Hitchens’ attack on the Pakistani elite and political/military establishment and the U.S.’s dysfunctional relationship to it: “From Abbottabad to Worse“ which appeared in Vanity Fair’s July 2011 issue, following the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Harsh, perhaps exaggerated, but probably not far off the mark:

“Again to quote myself from 2001, if Pakistan were a person, he (and it would have to be a he) would have to be completely humorless, paranoid, insecure, eager to take offense, and suffering from self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred. That last triptych of vices is intimately connected. The self-righteousness comes from the claim to represent a religion: the very name “Pakistan” is an acronym of Punjab, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and so forth, the resulting word in the Urdu language meaning “Land of the Pure.” The self-pity derives from the sad fact that the country has almost nothing else to be proud of: virtually barren of achievements and historically based on the amputation and mutilation of India in 1947 and its own self-mutilation in Bangladesh. The self-hatred is the consequence of being pathetically, permanently mendicant: an abject begging-bowl country that is nonetheless run by a super-rich and hyper-corrupt Punjabi elite. As for paranoia: This not so hypothetical Pakistani would also be a hardened anti-Semite, moaning with pleasure at the butchery of Daniel Pearl and addicted to blaming his self-inflicted woes on the all-powerful Jews.

“This dreary story actually does have some bearing on the “sovereignty” issue. In the beginning, all that the Muslim League demanded from the British was “a state for Muslims.” Pakistan’s founder and first president, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was a relatively secular man whose younger sister went around unveiled and whose second wife did not practice Islam at all. But there’s a world of difference between a state for Muslims and a full-on Muslim state. Under the rule of General Zia there began to be imposition of Shari’a and increased persecution of non-Muslims as well as of Muslim minorities such as the Shiites, Ismailis, and Ahmadis. In recent years these theocratic tendencies have intensified with appalling speed, to the point where the state contains not one but two secret statelets within itself: the first an impenetrable enclave of covert nuclear command and control and the second a private nexus of power at the disposal of the military intelligence services and—until recently—Osama bin Laden himself.”

This kid, Dimitri (someone correct me if it’s different in Macedonian) gives new meaning to the words of the Greek folk song: “Mother, you married me badly…”

The song I mean is originally a Sarakatsan song; the Sarakatsanoi are a Greek-speaking, (as opposed to Vlachs, who were the most widespread practitioners of pastoral transhumance in the Balkans and speak or mostly spoke a Romance language), formerly nomadic group who kept their flocks in the lowlands in the winter and migrated up into the cooler, greener mountains in the summer, where there were richer pasturelands and, especially, water, for them and their livestock, though unlike the semi-nomadic Vlachs,* who used their mobility to engage in extensive commerce as well and were noikokyrides who built big beautiful stone villages in their mountain homes, the Sarakatsanoi lived in huts traditionally, both in the plains and the hills. This kind of transhumance is not unique to the Balkans, but existed in Spain, in southern Italy, Anatolia (Yörük-s), and many other parts of the world. My mother used to remember day after day of the constant tinkling of sheep-bells as Sarakatsanoi passed through the valley under her village, moving their huge flocks to the higher mountains of the Djoumerka in the spring time. My great-grandmother was a Sarakatsana. And though permanently settled, often by force in some countries, there are still huge amounts of livestock moved (now by truck) into higher altitude areas all over the Balkans and I know, at least, in the Pyrenees too, on both French and Spanish sides.

The song tells the lament of a young bride who has been married off to a family in a lowland village, what in some Andean countries is known — with horror — as tierra caliente as opposed to tierra fria:

“Mother, you married me badly, and gave me to the plains, and I can’t bear the scorch, or drink this tepid water.”

There is also an alternative version: “…κι εγώ στ’αλέτρι δε βαστώ, ζεστό νερό δεν πίνω.” — “…and I can’t handle a plow, or drink this tepid water…” which gives a stronger sense of the highland pastoralist’s traditional aristocratic contempt for agricultural life — plowing and digging in the dirt and mud and burning sun — that used to be felt all over the Balkans for the people of the lowlands. You have to know how miserable the lowland, previously often malarial, parts of the Balkans still are to really feel these words under your skin. They give me, at least, the chills. There must be a Yörük song about the plain of Çukurova that expresses nearly identical sentiments, or a Pashtun song about the Punjabi lowlands. For Christians in the Balkans, to some extent, altitude also meant freedom, from Ottoman — or any — authority really, and from the likelihood that your community would end up part of some exploitative ağa’s çiftlik. Except for Albania, in much of the Balkans (and in the Levant, too) altitude was often a good correlator with the Christian/minority percentage of the population.

Back to Dimitri. Dimitri left his beautiful mountain village of Mavrovo in the Šar Mountains of Macedonia (shown below) to go work in Doha, malaka! In Qatar! (όνομα και πράμα)** Of course, he could only stand it for about a year, but made some money and came back to Mavrovo and opened a hotel and little bar-pastry-shop with his brother Darko, not in Mavrovo proper, but in Mavrovi Ani (The Hans of Mavrovo — from the Turkish-Persian for “inn”), because the mule caravans heading north into the plains of Tetovo and the rest of the Balkans used to meet here. Mavrovo — maybe it’s just my imagination or maybe tribal instinct — has the distinct feel of a front-line Christian village in a largely Muslim-Albanian area, like Derviçani, with Sveti Jovan, just up the road, watching its back. And from Mavrovo to Tetovo, unofficial capital of Macedonia’s some twenty-percent Albanian minority, all the crossbridges over the highway had “MAVROVO” graffitied on them. (I’ll get shit from the MESA Thought Police for writing stuff like this and probably even for dissing Qatar — though they’re allowed to — but, whatever, it comes with the territory. I’ll explain in another post.)

The mountains of Mavrovo national Park and the lake of Mavrovo below (click).

And below the view of the lake from Dimitri’s cafe (click). Can you imagine leaving here to go to the Gulf? And the mist and fog don’t even allow the photo to do the landscape justice.

Dimitri’s place, called Dva Sokola, “The Two Falcons” (I guess that’s him and Darko), has a great selection of home made raki of different kinds (grape, plum, quince), which in Macedonia you drink ice-cold out of these cool little decanters… (click on all)

pastries — and grrrreat börek! (I’ll write another post about why I get so excited about börek at a later time).

It was the end of April, but we needed a fire…

The “Two Falcons” is also a very nice hotel; if you’re in the region, which I highly recommend visiting, try and stay here; good skiing too, but this was a bad winter for snow. Their email address is:

dooel-da-di-kompani1@hotmail.com and they have a Facebook page at: Gostilnica “Dva Sokola” — check it out.

Mavrovo is in the far west of the country, the road we took from Ochrid to Tetovo basically straddling the border with Albania.

*Vlachs, who are found throughout the southern Balkans, and were serious political players in the Middle Ages in an empire they co-ruled with the Bulgarians (also, unbeknownst to me till recently, the imperial Byzantine family of the Comnenoi were of Thracian Vlach origin), are not just an all-around pleasant people, but the most attractively non-nationalist in the Balkans, even though until just this past generation their language was alive and well and sense of identity strong. Instead of engaging in the waste of blood, lives and time that the dissolution of Ottoman power in the Balkans entailed, they simply devoted their considerable skills and energy to being part of whatever country they ended up in — the Balkans’ first post-modernists. There was a brief attempt by Roumania to make them feel Roumanian before and up to WWII, but it pretty much petered out. Scratch about half the millionaires of the nineteenth-century Greek diaspora who built the Greek nation’s institutions, physically and organizationally, and you’ll find a Vlach. Same for Albania and Macedonia. Their separate ethnic consciousness and language survives most strongly in Albania, where I think they were recognized as a separate minority in communist times and, again, I think, even had schools in their language, though their numbers are greatest in Greece.

** Like most humor, this will be totally unfunny in translation, but I didn’t want to be unfair to non-Greek readers. “…όνομα και πράμα…” literally means “the name and the thing” in Greek; in other words, the name — in this case Qatar — says it all: “katara” is Greek for “curse.”

Daal makhani at Kesar da Dhaba. (Credit Kuni Takahashi for The New York Time)

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Money quote: “The word makhani means “with butter” in Hindi, and the hot and thick brown daal isn’t complete until it’s scooped into shallow steel bowls and topped with at least a half-stick that gradually melts in and makes for the creamiest rendition we had ever tasted.”

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From Bosnia to Bengal – the purpose of this blog

I'm Nicholas Bakos, a.k.a. "NikoBako." I'm Greek (Roman really, but only a handful of people today fully understand what I'm talking about when I say that, so I use "Greek" for shorthand). I'm from New York. I live all over the place these days. The rest should become obvious from the blog.